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The American Prospect - articles by authorenFrom Here to Brexiternity: The Crisis in British Politicshttp://prospect.org/article/here-brexiternity-crisis-british-politics
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<p>Prime Minister Theresa May addresses the House of Commons regarding the government's Brexit strategy</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">B</span>ritish politics in early March has been a tale of four prime ministers—two former ones, the present holder of the office, and one who would like to take over. Never in British history has there been such discordance between the past, present, and possibly future occupants of Downing Street.</p>
<p>Last Friday, Theresa May made her long awaited speech to define once and for all Britain’s relationship with Europe, with Ireland and her own relationship with an uncompromising anti-European isolationist right-wing. She said very little. Her speech was an mainly outreach to the English who voted “No” to Europe, not an effort to find common ground with a European Union that longs for some sign the U.K. might turn its back on the politics of close to amputational rupture.</p>
<p>May did not explain that the EU is what the Germans call a <em>Rechtsgemeinschaft</em>—a community of laws—and you cannot pick and chose the laws you obey. On the contrary, she offered proposals that offered the false hope that the U.K. could choose which bits of the EU it might conform with. But she rejected the core principles at the heart of European integrative cooperation. These are a common set of laws guaranteeing a single market and trade policy, enforceable worker and environmental rights, and the right of all EU citizens to live, work, or retire anywhere in Europe.</p>
<p>There about 300,000 British firms which trade outside the U.K., principally to the European Union’s open market of some 450 million middle-class consumers. That part of the British economy is deeply integrated into global capitalism, and has been lobbying hard to keep full access full access. May’s speech mentioned the auto, aviation, chemical, pharmaceutical, and TV industries, but only to suggest the EU should grant privileged access to just a handful of sectors in the British economy. This is wildly improbable.</p>
<p>She admitted for the first time that there would be a hit on the British economy as a whole, especially in the City of London which will lose its current unfettered access to the capital markets and financial services client base in the EU’s 27 member nations.</p>
<p>Gone was the triumphalism of 2016 and 2017 in which a “Global Britain” would shape a “Red, White, and Blue” Brexit to propel Britain into the front rank, de-shackled from the EU to be transformed into as a key partner for rising economic powers like China and India. Yet discounting subtle shifts in rhetoric, May has not deviated from her basic line since she became prime minister after the Brexit plebiscite vote in June 2016.</p>
<p>Britain technically leaves the EU on March 29, 2019. May has asked for and obtained a period of grace, a transition until January 2021. In this time, the U.K. having left the formal membership of the treaty will still maintain access to the EU’s Single Market, its Customs Union, and obey all its laws and rulings without having any say in their formulation.</p>
<p>Unkind critics have said this makes the U.K. a vassal state of Brussels but for most firms it will be much better to stay as an economic vassal than to have a full rupture with the European Union.</p>
<p>In essence May is buying a little time, kicking the can down the road. Many key decisions are being put off, to be discussed in this transition period.</p>
<p>But can they be decided? May insists she wants a new deep trading partnership with the EU she is committed to leaving. It’s like dumping your wife or husband but insisting that conjugal rights, hot meals, and overnight stays are on offer even as the partner walking out goes off in the hunt for wonderful new freedoms and pleasures having left the boring relationship behind.</p>
<p>May’s speech was greeted skeptically by both hard-line anti-European Tory MPs and by those who want Britain to remain in Europe. She is a woman who has spent her entire life in daily social communion with activists in the Tory Party. There are 70,000 Conservative Party members, and their average age is 71. Their favorite movies tend to be films like <em>Dunkirk</em> and <em>Darkest Hour</em> that show the brave, battling Brits of World War II glory taking on the Hun and avoiding the capitulationist Frogs.</p>
<p>These are the people who keep May in power. Her speech gently nudged them to a little more reality that Brexit will not bring in marvelous new sources of wealth and income for Britain, but she is not yet prepared to speak for the 27 million U.K. voters who did not vote for Brexit but only the 17.4 million who did. (The U.K. electorate in June 2016 stood at 44.5 million voters of whom 17.4 million voted to cut links with Europe.)</p>
<p>She has bought a little peace in her party, at the price of a continuing annoyance from European leaders who firmly that the U.K. could not have its cake and eat it. And she is no closer to a deal.</p>
<p>And it was not just Theresa May who made important speeches last week. On Wednesday and Thursday her two predecessors as prime minister, John Major and then Tony Blair, made big speeches on Europe.</p>
<p>Major lambasted Tory cheerleaders for Brexit like Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson as delusional. He attacked May’s negotiating red lines, as “not only grand folly ... also bad politics.” He added, “I believe that to risk losing our trade advantages with the colossal market on our doorstep is to inflict economic self-harm on the British people.”</p>
<p>It was an astonishing attack on his own party’s leadership. Major lost power in 1997 and for the last 20 years has obeyed the rule of retired prime ministers, which is not to dump your load on your successor’s doorstep. </p>
<p>Now the silence is over and Britain sat back at the spectacle of Major and May openly at loggerheads. Major was denounced by a Tory MP as a “traitor” and the same accolade was bestowed on him by <em>The</em> <em>Daily Mail</em>, the cheerleader against Europe today just as it was a cheerleader for Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s. </p>
<p>Major was followed by his successor, Tony Blair, in Brussels. Blair also made a passionate speech attacking the delusional folly of Brexit in terms of the U.K. losing all automatic unfettered access to the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union.</p>
<p>This may sound technical but today from London about 85 percent of all the foreign-made TV shows—mainly American—that can be watched on TV channels in 28 EU member states are sold out of London. The reason is that once the U.K.’s TV standards regulator, called OffCom, says a foreign program meets British standards on violence, bad language, sex scenes then no other national TV regulator from Athens to Helsinki can block it.</p>
<p>That’s how the EU Single Market works. Now May says Britain must give up that membership of the Single Market. So a two billion-pound niche industry employing 10,000 people in London will move to operate out an EU capital—probably Amsterdam—to keep that market access.</p>
<p>Multiply that across any number of business sectors, especially financial-sector firms that have made the City into Europe’s Wall Street and you get some idea of the potential impact of Brexit. </p>
<p>Blair’s attack also focused on the huge dangers to peace in Northern Ireland if what is called a hard border returns between the British controlled six counties in the north of Ireland and the rest of Ireland. If, as May insists, Britain leaves the EU Customs Union, it is axiomatic that there will be controls at customs checkpoints on the meat, milk, other agricultural goods, and any other products that are produced in the north and go into Ireland for processing.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Even inside NAFTA there are customs checks between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. But having border controls in Ireland is toxic in political terms.</span> Right now you can drive from the U.K. into the Republic of Ireland as one might from Maryland into Virginia. Re-introduce checkpoints because that is what English Tories and hard-line Ulster want, and once again, Ireland is partitioned.</p>
<p>The genius of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was that it ended that physical separation between north and south without requiring anyone to surrender either British or Irish citizenship. Now in giving in to the English and Ulster hard-liners who want out of the EU Customs Union at any price May is sacrificing the Good Friday agreement on the altar of Brexit, as Blair put it.</p>
<p>Both former prime ministers are incandescent at May’s insouciance. In her speech she refused to face down her hard-line Orange Brexit faction who dismissed the Good Friday Agreement—actually a solemn treaty between London and Dublin with 140 different sections based on EU laws and norms—and instead said a working party might be set up to try and find a solution.</p>
<p>The man who would like to be prime minister, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, also made a Brexit speech, last Monday. It was a cautious move away from his position, which up to now has been identical to that of May. He said Labour could countenance Britain staying in the Customs Union if remodeled along lines he could accept. It was hailed as a big Labour turn away from Brexit—but in the same speech Corbyn said the U.K. had to leave the Single Market which still means a major rupture with Europe.</p>
<p>Corbyn has turned down the chance to be the champion of the 27 million who did not vote for Brexit. The Labour leader hopes that some kind of crisis—either British capitalism rejecting May or her own MPs turning on her—might provoke the fall of the government and a general election, which Labour could win. In the current fébrile state of British politics with Brexit as a kind of Ebola virus sucking the life juices out of parties and government anything is possible. All the same, there are 53 more Tory MPs than Labour MPs and Tory MPs don’t normally vote themselves out of power.</p>
<p>The reaction from both pro- and anti-EU wings of the Tory Party finding bits of May’s speech they could welcome is a temporary truce, but as in the past the Conservative will ditch every principle, make every necessary U-turn in order to maintain themselves in power.</p>
<p>In any event, there is no majority of MPs ready to vote a new general election and Labour will have to wait until 2022 probably to get a chance for power when Corbyn will be 73.</p>
<p>May insisted in her speech that under any form of Brexit, European Union citizens would lose their current automatic right to come to the U.K. and if they find work, live in Britain just as two million Brits use the same right to live or retire to warmed parts of Europe like the coasts of Spain, Greek islands, or the Dordogne in southwest France.</p>
<p>So her message to Europe was we don’t want you or need you but we will do business with you on our terms; and by the way, you can’t come here unless you go through an unpleasant immigration bureaucracy.</p>
<p>The reaction from Europe was firm. Manfred Weber, Angela Merkel’s closest political aide who heads the European People Party federation of all the main center-right and conservative parties in the European Parliament, said she was “burying her head in the sand.” Guy Verhofstadt, the former prime minister of Belgium who now heads the Liberal groups of MEPs and is the European Parliament’s negotiator on Brexit said all May had done was to demand a few more cherries on the cake she would like to both eat and still have.</p>
<p>The Czech Europe Minister pointed out that the kind of free trade agreement says she would like to conclude with the EU takes many years, more than a decade to negotiate and agree with all EU governments and parliament including regional ones.</p>
<p>So this is no breakthrough speech. All remains to be discussed and decided though on many key areas the decisions will be put off until end 2020 with many key areas being negotiated well into the next decade.</p>
<p>As Keynes pointed out in the long run we are all dead and MPs as yet unborn will be debating Brexit long into the 21st century.</p>
<p>Certainly there is no major trade agreement in the world that has taken much under a decade to negotiate and conclude. So after May’s speech, the endless years of Brexit haggling and internal U.K. quarrels continue. It is from here to Brexiternity. </p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 06 Mar 2018 10:00:00 +0000229699 at http://prospect.orgDenis MacShaneBrexit Hate Propagandahttp://prospect.org/article/brexit-hate-propaganda
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<p>An anti-Soros campaign ad reading "99 percent reject illegal migration" and “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh” in Budapest</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>as Viktor Orban, the populist, Jew-baiting prime minister of Hungary, been invited by the proprietors of London isolationist anti-European press to be their guest editor?</p>
<p>In Poland, the ultra-Catholic rightist nationalist leader, Jarosław Kaczynski, is pushing through a law which will make it a crime, including fines and imprisonment, to state the historical truth that during the Nazi occupation of Poland, there were some Poles who committed anti-Semitic acts, denounced Polish Jews to the Gestapo, and in the village of Jedwabne, herded Jews into a building and set it alight.</p>
<p>These are well-documented facts and Princeton Professor Jan Gross, himself a victim of the last purge of Jews in Poland in 1968, when the communist regime expelled thousands of mainly young Jewish students as trouble-makers and subversives, has written magisterial books on this dark side of Polish history.</p>
<p>In Hungary, Viktor Orban has launched an extraordinary attacks on George Soros, the 87-year-old Hungarian-American Jew who became fabulously rich but since his retirement from active investing has poured millions into his Open Society Foundations. This, like any number of liberal endowments, supports freedom of speech, independent scholarship, universities free of state or big-business control, women’s rights, liberal market democratic ideas, free elections, and all the gamut of desirable end results that were meant to emerge after the end of communism nearly three decades ago.</p>
<p>The objectives are all worthy and in the their different ways supported by the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Europe, the German Marshall Fund, and a long list of foundations set up by successful business leaders who wanted to do good and not just pass on their fortune to their children or younger wives.</p>
<p>But for Orban and other rightist nationalist European leaders, the grants from Open Society to the Central European University in Budapest and to other campaigns supporting liberal values and causes like rights for women or media freedom is a direct political interference in this right to run Hungary the way he thinks best. To get a flavor of where Hungary is heading, read <em>District 8</em>, the political thriller by the Budapest-based British journalist, Adam Lebor. It’s fiction, but only a few steps ahead of the facts that Orban is trying to establish on the ground as he tries to fashion a Hungary that shuts its door to incomers, is anti-Muslim, demands a patriotic nationalist interpretation of history, lays irredentist claim to large chunks of Romania and Slovenia, and requires journalists to promote the Orban line.</p>
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<p>Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks in 2017</p>
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<p>Soros and his Open Society Foundations provide an alternative voice. He doesn’t campaign politically against Orban, and the failure of Hungarian liberals and social democrats to organize an effective vote-winning coalition against Orban cannot be replaced by grant money from Soros.</p>
<p>Soros survived the fascistic Admiral Horthy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating Hungary Jewry, went to the London School of Economics as a 17-year-old in 1948, and then on to America.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">One might have thought Hungary and Orban would have feted their fellow Hungarian and his incredible success in the Western capitalist system.</span></p>
<p>But instead, Orban covered Hungary with giant posters of Soros like something of 1984’s Hate Week against Emmanuel Goldstein—the Leon Trotsky look-alike Orwell depicted as the number one enemy of Big Brother and a Jew to boot.</p>
<p>Open Society put out a statement accusing Orban of “employing anti-Semitic tropes reminiscent of the 1930s.” The posters of Soros’s face with its striking central European Jewish characteristics were spray-painted with insults like “Stinking Jew,” and Hungarians did not need Ph.D.s in prewar anti-Jewish history to get the point Orban was trying to make.</p>
<p>The Hungarian strongman took down his posters just before the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last July. But now exactly the same kind of attacks have been launched in Britain against Soros because he refuses to bow to the Tory ideology of anti-Europeanism, or fall in obediently behind Rupert Murdoch and other owners or controllers of the British media who are obsessed with amputating Britain from Europe.</p>
<p>There are many reasons why 37 percent of the total EU electorate voted to cut Britain’s links with Europe in June 2016, but an important factor was a quarter of a century of non-stop propaganda against Europe by Murdoch, who intensely disliked EU rules promoting trade union rights and blocking monopoly media power.</p>
<p>Murdoch, like Soros, is an American citizen, and other papers owned by men who pay no or few taxes in the United Kingdom, like the <em>Daily Mail</em> and <em>The Daily Telegraph</em>, have been campaigning non-stop against Europe in their news and comment columns.</p>
<p>Now the<em> Telegraph</em> may have gone a step too far. Furious with support given by Soros and his Open Society Foundations to outfits campaigning for the right of the British people to be consulted on the terms on which the Theresa May government takes Britain out of Europe, the <em>Telegraph </em>printed a whole front page with a giant picture of a leering, smirking Soros and a mixture of news and comment arguments attacking him as an unwanted outsider trying to interfere in British politics.</p>
<p>Stephen Pollard, the right-wing editor of <em>The Jewish Chronicle,</em> the principal weekly paper read in most Jewish households in Britain, joined with <em>The Guardian</em>’s respected political columnist, the left-liberal Rafael Behr, in protesting about the front page, which was partly penned by May’s adviser and confidante, Nicholas Timothy, a fanatical anti-European.</p>
<p>It is necessary to state that there is no evidence that Timothy or the <em>Telegraph</em> editors who wrote the copy and chose the headlines and the shaded photo have any record of anti-Semitism. As Rafael Behr wrote: “There is no one specific line or picture or adjective or omission that can be held up as cast-iron proof. There is no single moment where the line is crossed. There is no clause or adjective from which the anti-Semitic smoke rises as from the barrel of gun. And yet a modicum of cultural awareness and a glancing acquaintance with old Jew-hatred and its modern iterations would have alerted a half-decent editor to the signal being sent by that front page.”</p>
<p>Behr continued <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/08/brexit-antisemitic-dog-whistle-daily-telegraph-george-soros">in a column that went viral</a>. “In case there is no such person at the Telegraph to decrypt that signal let me spell it out for them. It was this: shadowy Jew-financier conspires against Britain. That might not seem obvious to many readers. It might even sound a little paranoid. But I am very confident that two audiences understood it instantly and very clearly in exactly those terms. One was anti-Semites, the other was Jews. The first group cheered, the second recoiled in horror.”</p>
<p>Of course, no one ever admits to being an anti-Semite. Leadership figures in the Labour Party insist they are not anti-Semitic and they are not. But there is anti-Semitism to be found in some militant activists in Labour Party membership. Every week in mainstream accurate newspapers, there are reports of an anti-Semitic outburst at a Labour Party meeting or an ugly tweet or Facebook comments directed at Jews or Jewish causes. Many loyal Labour Party members, MPs, and senior supporters are desperately worried that the failure of the leadership to deal robustly with any expression of hate against the Jewish people—often coded as anti-Zionism or support for Islamist organization that have in their charters crude anti-Jewish language—are losing Labour its traditional support in the Jewish community.</p>
<p>We have been here before. Twenty-five years ago, London was shocked by a casual racist murder by four white men who killed a black teenager, Stephen Lawrence. The police, some of whom were linked to the killer, failed to conduct an effective inquiry. They were all white. What was one fewer black on the street? After the brutal murder and the cover-up by the Metropolitan Police, the incoming Labour government in 1997 set up an official inquiry. Its chair, Sir William McPherson, described the “institutional racism” of Scotland Yard, which meant the white police failed to do proper detective work on the dead black boy. He also argued that it was the victim, not the perpetrator of a racist (or anti-Semitic) insult or attack, who should define whether it was racist or anti-Semitic.</p>
<p>I chaired an all-party committee of inquiry into anti-Semitism after 2005, and the MPs on it accepted—as did the government—the McPherson definition of it being defined by the injured or hurt person, not by the writer or assailant.</p>
<p>So while everyone on the<em> Telegraph</em> no doubt sincerely believes they cannot possibly produce any story, headline, or lay-out that might worry or disturb Jews, they cannot be the judges, as respected public figures like Raphael Behr and Stephen Pollard, as well as many others, feel alarmed.</p>
<p>As Philip Stephens, the chief political columnist on the <em>Financial Times</em>, noted: “Efforts to discredit Mr Soros, often tinged with more than a hint of anti-Semitism, have reached fever pitch in Hungary” and “prompted widespread condemnation from Jewish groups,” as Hungary’s populist and EU-critical leader, Viktor Orban, “has deployed all the anti-Semitic tropes in the attempt to discredit Mr. Soros.”</p>
<p>Stephens has just returned from a study period in Berlin, where he was exposed to the nastier elements of Central European populism. The arrival of Orban-like hate against Soros worries the FT correspondent. “Nicholas Timothy, a former senior adviser to Theresa May, wrote that Mr. Soros was financing a campaign to bring down the prime minister and the Conservative government in order to scupper Brexit.”</p>
<p>In 1992, Soros famously bet billions in his investment fund against the pound sterling staying in the European Union’s Exchange Rate Mechanism, which linked together different European currencies like the Deutschmark, French franc, or Dutch guilder at fixed rates prior to the introduction of the euro.</p>
<p>British Conservative finance ministers, none qualified or competent economists, had locked the pound into the Exchange Rate Mechanism at too high a rate. As the U.K. economy in the post-Thatcher 1990s hit the rocks, the pound was clearly over-valued and Soros cleaned up big time when the then-Chancellor Norman Lamont was forced to take sterling out of the ERM.</p>
<p>It was a national humiliation, an enforced devaluation that symbolized the end of the greed and easy winnings from fire-sale privatizations of Thatcher-era capitalism.</p>
<p>That was the moment when previously Europhile Tories like Lamont and his predecessor, Nigel Lawson, turned bitter and sour against Europe. In Freudian terms, it was pure transference. The Lawson-Lamont failure to manage the economy and public finances so as to maintain budget, debt, and deficit equilibrium was the main cause for the ERM debacle, which destroyed the reputation for economic competence for the remainder of the Tory government from 1992 to 1997.</p>
<p>But Soros’s intervention and the ERM debacle ensure the United Kingdom never got close to abolishing the pound in favor of the euro now used by 19 EU member states. The yo-yo unstable pound of the 1990s with Britain being outside the ERM, a precondition for Euro entry, meant that independently of Tony Blair’s 1997 manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on Euro entry, the chances of the pound fusing with continental money into the single currency were zero by 1997.</p>
<p>Soros, it can be argued “saved” Britain, from the Euro. Rather than blackguarding him, the Tory Brexiters should see him as one of their heroes!</p>
<p>But of course, the Brexit journalism of the <em>Telegraph</em> and the <em>Daily Mail</em> comes straight from the 1930s news manuals of the pro-Nazi appeasement paper owned by rich proprietors who liked to dictate to elected politicians. <span class="pullquote-right">The hate against European immigrants today has similarities to the tirades in the <em>Daily Mail</em> in the 1930s against allowing Jewish refugees form Nazi Germany to enter Britain.</span></p>
<p>British readers of the anti-European press have gotten used to screaming giant headlines denouncing SABOTEURS or TRAITORS to describe parliamentarians or jurists who raise questions about Brexit.</p>
<p>Their nonsense about Soros being a secret conspirator trying to overthrow governments is out of the standard prewar conspiracy protocols of the Elders of the Open Society. In fact, the first Open Society Foundations donation for the anti-Brexit campaign outfit, Best for Britain, was made only in June 2017. In the last tranche, there was 86,000 pounds for a Tory think-tank, Bright Blue. The Open Society Foundation has an impressive record of donating money for pro-market, liberal, rule-of-law, free media causes.</p>
<p>Compared with the billions that the American-Australian “foreigner” Rupert Murdoch has poured—and, along with the off-shore-owned <em>Daily Telegraph</em> or Lord Rothermere’s <em>Daily Mail</em>, is still pouring—into the campaign to do serious constitutional, economic, and geopolitical damage to Britain and the 63 percent of voters who did not vote for Brexit, the donation by Soros is a pittance. </p>
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<p>Rupert Murdoch speaking in 2015</p>
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<p>Of course, the Soros donation to a Tory think-tank does not get a mention nor does the fact these donations date back several months. For the <em>Telegraph</em>, all normal news values, fact-checking, rounding out the story, and being ultra-careful given the non-stop anti-Semitic attacks on Soros, notably in Hungary, were thrown overboard for the sake of a cheesy front page.</p>
<p>The <em>Telegraph</em>/<em>Mail</em>/<em>Sun</em> attacks on Soros show how the anti-European propagandists have to crawl in the gutter to find stories and excitable front pages. They resort to anti-Soros denunciations because the economic news on Brexit just gets worse and worse. Latest leaked government economic estimates show that the regional economies of England’s northeast and west Midlands regions face double-digit GDP drops in the event of the United Kingdom leaving the Customs Union and Single Market.</p>
<p>The Irish government in Dublin is desperately fearful of the destruction of the Good Friday Agreement if May repudiates the open border upon leaving the EU’s Customs Union. In a remarkable break with the ultra-discreet norms of Japanese diplomacy, Tokyo’s ambassador in London left a meeting with May and, on the steps of Downing Street, warned that Japanese automakers—Nissan, Toyota, Honda—will pull out of Britain as they lose money upon the United Kingdom leaving the Customs Union and Single Market.</p>
<p>The Brexit vote is generating considerable apprehension and anxiety in economic circles. British capitalism is now in undeclared conflict with ruling Tory circles as every sector of British business, from the City to key foreign investors, looks with fear at the idea of cutting access to the EU’s Single Market of 450 million middle class consumers.</p>
<p>Combined with the almost permanent incoherence and chaos in government on Brexit and the civil war in the Tory Party, one can sense all belief that Brexit is good for Britain ebbing away.</p>
<p>That does not translate automatically into a reversal of Brexit. It will take more time and a lot more evidence before anyone will risk a new referendum. But the tide is going out on the Tory-UKIP lies that won the June 2016 plebiscite.</p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 10:00:06 +0000229557 at http://prospect.orgDenis MacShaneWill Oscars Go to Britain’s Fake History Films?http://prospect.org/article/will-oscars-go-britain%E2%80%99s-fake-history-films
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<p>Christopher Nolan at the world premiere of <em>Dunkirk</em>, in London</p>
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>he Oscars take place early March and two movies about Britain in 1940—<em>Dunkirk</em> and <em>Darkest Hour</em>—have plenty of nominations, notably for Gary Oldman’s imitation of Winston Churchill and the remarkable cinematography of Dunkirk.</p>
<p>Yet both are full of historical nonsense and are actually Brexit films—made to allow movie-goers in Brexit Britain to wallow in the warm bath of nostalgia for English superiority when Britain was utterly cut off from Europe and everyone felt united and closer to the English-speaking Empire and the United States rather than beastly Nazis or cowardly, capitulationist French.</p>
<p>Oldman joins a long list of actors who have tried to portray Churchill. But he actually portrays other actors’ Churchill take. There are very few radio or TV recordings of Churchill speaking and the voice is slow and pedantic as he reads a text carefully written out beforehand. Churchill never claimed to be an orator and praised other natural speakers in his political life like Lloyd George or Labour’s brilliant speaker, the former miner, Aneurin Bevan, as much better speakers.</p>
<p>In <em>Darkest Hour</em>, the broken Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of appeasement is presented as a bitter enemy of Churchill. In fact, Chamberlain told King George VI to make Churchill prime minister, as the only Conservative politician the Labour party and trade unions would serve under in a wartime coalition.</p>
<p>The film presents the Labour leader and postwar prime minister, Clement Attlee, as a ranting demagogue denouncing Chamberlain in a bitter House of Commons speech.</p>
<p>Attlee never made such a speech. He was a determined socialist but a mild-manned public school and Oxford educated middle class politician who never raised his voice, waved his arms around, or shouted when speaking.</p>
<p>Both films show the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk as a miracle performed by hundreds of pleasure craft and small boats hastily commandeered on southern English coastal resorts and fishing boat harbors.</p>
<p>The vast bulk of the 330,000 British and allied soldiers brought back from Dunkirk embarked from a long mole onto 40 British destroyers and cruisers. The film ends with Sir Kenneth Branagh playing a Royal Naval officer bravely staying behind to help French soldiers evacuate to England. In truth, 100,000 French soldiers were brought back to England at the same time as the British Army.</p>
<p>The French Army lost 40,000 men defending the Dunkirk evacuation perimeter and the sacrifice of French soldiers is written out of the movie, which presents the story as one of English heroism and glory in contrast to the wicked or fainéant continentals. Similarly, in <em>Darkest Hour</em>, French politicians are presented as drooling idiots in contrast to stiff-upper-lipped Brits.</p>
<p><em>Dunkirk</em> has a Spitfire landing gently on the water, floating for a while as a dramatic struggle to save the pilot unfolds. The Spitfire’s Rolls Royce Merlin engine weighed 2,800 kilograms and any plane landing on water would have tipped over front-first to sink instantly.</p>
<p><em>Darkest Hour</em> has a surreal scene in which Churchill takes the London metro from Downing Street to the House of Commons—a walk of three minutes. On the Underground the new prime minister exchanges verses from Macaulay’s <em>Lays of Ancient Rome </em>with a cheerful young black man. There were a handful of Afro-Caribbeans in London in 1940 but Churchill never took the metro and the idea that 19th century imperial poetry was on the lips of black Londoners is surreal.</p>
<p>Churchill was able to form his coalition because the Labour Party was holding its annual conference at the time of the May 1940 crisis when Chamberlain resigned. Les militants voted to allow Labour to enter the coalition. This of course does not feature in the movie.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote-right">Labour and Attlee were far more aware of European fascism in contrast to Churchill, who praised Mussolini as a statesman</span> who has “rendered a service to the whole world … a Roman genius—the greatest lawgiver amongst men.”</p>
<p>Prewar Tory appeasement policy allowed Hitler a free hand in the Rhineland, the Spanish Civil War, Czechoslovakia, and Austria. Labour knew from its social democratic comrades in Germany and Austria, from trade unions, and from a network of Jewish contacts what Hitlerism amounted to.</p>
<p>Churchill opposed Germany’s hegemonic ambitions in Europe, which he saw as a strategic threat to the British Empire.</p>
<p>Thus the strongly anti-Labour and anti-trade union Churchill combined with Attlee, Labour, and the trade unions in a coalition against Hitler that not just helped defeat Nazism (with more than a little input from the Soviet Union, and in due course from the U.S.), but went on to reshape Britain after 1945.</p>
<p><em>Darkest Hour</em> has Churchill talking to President Roosevelt on a secure transatlantic telephone line. The first of those telephone calls took place in 1943. Roosevelt in 1940 had to win his third election by promising American mothers their sons would not be sent to fight in a European war.</p>
<p>In 1946, Churchill called for the creation of a “United States of Europe,” in contrast to Attlee’s Labour government, which resisted any role in the first steps towards European integration in 1950.</p>
<p>As a former MP, I can say the scenes in <em>Darkest Hour</em> of the House of Commons are just wrong. It is an intimate conversational chamber not one where MPs orate and thump the despatch box and wave their arms in the air.</p>
<p>Perhaps none of this matters. A movie is a movie not a historical monograph. But both films are peak nostalgia about a Britain utterly disconnected from Europe and all the better for it. They belong to today’s Brexit-era propaganda about an imagined Britain in 1940 that never existed. But the majority of older English voters for whom the Britain of 1940 was better, purer, and true to itself precisely because it was cut off from the continent is the Britain they dream of recreating outside the European Union.</p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 02 Feb 2018 10:00:00 +0000229421 at http://prospect.orgDenis MacShaneNot Britain’s Finest Hourhttp://prospect.org/article/not-britain%E2%80%99s-finest-hour
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><em>This article appears in the Fall 2017 issue of </em>The American Prospect <em>magazine. <a href="http://www.prospect.org/subscribe"><strong>Subscribe here</strong></a>. </em></p>
<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>t is not often that a great, historic nation decides the game is over and relegates itself out of the top rank of economic and geopolitical players. But future historians may decide that is exactly what Britain has done in its convulsions over Brexit.</p>
<p>A personal confession. I coined the term Brexit in 2012 when modish headlines were full of Grexit—Greece exiting the euro single currency and possibly even the European Union itself. Today, Greece under its left-populist Syriza government is the EU’s poster boy as the Greeks swallow every dose of bitter medicine the EU and the International Monetary Fund prescribe.</p>
<p>No one talks of Grexit anymore—but Brexit is the biggest thing to hit Europe since the collapse of Soviet communism. In the Queen’s tenth decade, she does not know if her successor will reign over a truly united kingdom, as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are coldly bitter at the triumph of an English nationalism that won the Brexit vote.</p>
<p>Britain does not do revolutions, or at least not since the 1640s, when a king’s head was chopped off at the end of a civil war that helped create the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament over the state and the nation. Yet it is hard to see Brexit as anything other than a revolutionary moment. It has destroyed one prime minister, and could destroy another. It has transferred power from representative elected institutions to a populist plebiscite. It entails the biggest reduction in geopolitical influence ever seen in Britain. Together with Trump, the Brexit neo-isolationism implies that the long 19th- and 20th-century hegemony of English-speaking power—the United Kingdom and then the United States—could be over.</p>
<p>With Brexit, paradoxically, Britain has had a massive impact on continental European politics—but not the one that the “Leave” voters wanted—as the rest of Europe has recoiled in horror. European leaders are now more united on the need to stay together and not let Britain have a special status in which it has all the economic benefits of EU membership but none of the political burdens, such as the sharing of sovereignty or paying a share of the EU’s running costs.</p>
<p>The 27 EU member states have found new virtues in the much-criticized European Union, and a new unity on Brexit. That’s good for the EU, bad for Britain.</p>
<p>Britain needs the European Union far more than the EU needs Britain. EU growth was stronger in 2016 than American or British growth. Overall, EU unemployment in mid-2017 was 7.7 percent, which includes the 22 percent jobless rate in Greece. Today, unemployment is falling in France, Spain, and Portugal, and the two Iberian peninsular nations are posting growth rates in 2017 of 3 percent or more. The U.K. growth rate was just 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2017 and estimated at 0.3 percent in the second quarter, which projects to an annualized growth rate of 1 percent. Such growth as there is according to the U.K. Office of National Statistics is due to government spending. <span class="pullquote">Business investment is flat and productivity is falling. Growth would only fall further with Brexit.</span></p>
<p>In a July 2017 report, IMF economists identified the United Kingdom as having the largest trade deficit of 28 of the world’s biggest economies, running at 4.4 percent of GDP, in contrast to a surplus for Eurozone countries. U.K. government debt is 89 percent of GDP, more than double the level in 2007, the year when Tony Blair left office and the Tories took over. The British middle classes have not had a real wage rise in more than a decade and have only been able to maintain consumption by going massively into debt. The slightest rise in interest rates or the loss of a job will cause real problems.</p>
<p>For the United Kingdom, the economics of Brexit are almost entirely negative. Today, any firm based in Britain—British or foreign, from modern media creative firms to banks, to auto firms like Nissan, Honda, and Toyota, to universities or management consultants—can produce in Britain and sell into every corner of the world’s biggest market, the European Union. Britain runs an enduring trade deficit in goods but a surplus in services—notably the giant network of financial-sector services based in the City of London, the Wall Street of Europe. But EU leaders have made clear that automatic access to selling bonds, or pension, or trading euros is conditional on being in the European Union, or at least agreeing to abide by EU laws and regulations, much as a foreign bank or firm in the United States has to abide by American laws as well as federal and state ordinances. Prime Minister Theresa May insists that on March 29, 2019, Britain will walk out of all these economic arrangements to become what in trade parlance is called a “third” country, like Mexico or South Korea or Nigeria, seeking to export to the 27 nations in the EU. Each product’s access will have to be separately negotiated. Britain will be the loser.</p>
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<p><strong>BREXIT HAS ALREADY ALTERED</strong> British politics. The ruling Conservative Party suffered a major defeat in the June 2017 election, one that was abruptly and opportunistically called by Theresa May. In the first months of the year, she was credited with a 20-point lead over a Labour Party led by a scion of the 1968 generation of committed leftists—Jeremy Corbyn. But May lost her majority and has had to pay 1 billion pounds to an extreme, homophobic, and sectarian ultra-Protestant party in Northern Ireland to obtain the support of their ten members of parliament. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) combining with 316 Conservative MPs put the Tories just barely over the threshold of 325 seats—the number needed for a working majority in the 650-member House of Commons. The DUP are creationists who believe that God created the world 4,004 years before Christ was born. The party is riddled with incestuous financial and sexual histories.</p>
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<p>The London political class likes to look down its nose at the erratic and financially dubious political practices elsewhere in Europe. But Britain has been plunged into five major national elections in three years (the 2014 European Parliament elections and the Scottish independence referendum, the 2015 general election, the 2016 EU referendum, and the 2017 general election). It has a ruling party without a majority, a prime minister cordially loathed by her own MPs, and a cabinet openly at war with itself, making the Trump White House look like an oasis of Eisenhower calm by comparison.</p>
<p>The opposition Labour Party has a leader who is a big fan of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, supported Slobodan Milosevic, and is unwilling to purge his party of rank anti-Semites. Ignored or marginalized for most of his time in the Commons since 1983 as a home to endless lost causes, Corbyn, now 68, found that there was finally an audience for his reasoned denunciations of the shameful inequality and cruelty of austerity cuts on public services and indirect tax rises for the poor while the better-off get richer by the second.</p>
<p>Never in British political history has the country seen 12 months—June 2016 to June 2017—as dramatic as this. Prime Minister David Cameron thought he was sailing to an easy win in his referendum on the European Union. On the referendum day itself, his pollsters were telling him it would be a 55–45 win in favor of Europe. By the end of the count, Cameron was finished. If Lord North in British history books is the prime minister who lost America in the 1780s, David Cameron is the prime minister who lost Europe 230 years later.</p>
<p>The Brexit vote divided Britain in a way never seen before. London, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the young all voted in favor of Europe. But an English nationalist vote outside London, consisting of the white middle and working classes who had been told for years that there were too many immigrants in Britain, carried the day.</p>
<p>It was assumed that one of the Tories who campaigned for Brexit, notably Boris Johnson, would inherit Downing Street. But revolutions devour their children, and the pro-Brexit Tories stabbed each other in the front, back, and all sides and lost the prize. As the sea of blood rose in front of 10 Downing Street, there appeared a small dinghy with a large woman in it floating gently into the cabinet room on the left of the Downing Street ground floor. Theresa May became Britain’s second woman prime minister.</p>
<p>But Margaret Thatcher she isn’t. The only child of a vicar, she has spent every waking minute since graduating in geography from Oxford working her way up the ranks of the Conservative Party. When she went as prime minister to the G20, it was the first time she had set foot in China. She doesn’t do America, unlike many of the Brexit Tories who dream of creating an Anglosphere and bringing back to life their imagined 1980s dream Reagan-Thatcher axis. Her favorite reading is cookery books, and she holidays walking in the Swiss Alps where everyone speaks English.</p>
<p>The Brexit vote was a narrow 52–48. <span class="pullquote">Just 37 percent of the total electorate voted to leave Europe.</span> In previous constitutional referendums, it was necessary to win at least 40 percent of all eligible votes for a decision to stand. The referendum was advisory, not binding, under law. Hundreds of thousands of 18- to 24-year-old voters were not listed to vote as David Cameron changed the electoral registration system to make it harder for younger voters—thought to be anti-Tory—to vote. In addition, large numbers of Brits who live on the continent did not vote because of the complexities in voting registration for British ex-pats.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, May interpreted the referendum vote as a mandate for an extreme Brexit. Since the late 1990s, when the Tories decided the only way they could attack Tony Blair was by branding him as a quasi-traitor ready to dissolve Britain into a European minestrone run by foreigners in Brussels, the Conservative Party has steadily become more Europhobic.</p>
<p>William Hague, the Tory leader after 1997, kept demanding referendums on minor, long-forgotten EU treaties agreed upon in Amsterdam and Nice. The demand for a plebiscite of the anti-European Tories like Hague grew in intensity in the Labour years. This denied the supremacy of representative parliamentary democratic tradition, which had been a bedrock of Tory political philosophy for centuries. Margaret Thatcher called referendums “a device of dictators and demagogues.” But Conservatives found themselves locked out of power for 13 years, 1997 to 2010, the longest period without the spoils of office in peacetime since the 19th century. Even when Labour was defeated in 2010, the Tories could govern only in coalition with Liberal Democrats, a party they despised.</p>
<p>Finally, Cameron won a majority in 2015. His first big decision was to hold the referendum on Europe the following year. His justification was that he needed to lance the anti-European boil that dominated right-wing politics in Britain. He himself however created the monster he now hoped a referendum might slay. He won the Tory leadership in 2005 as the most anti-European candidate. He and his shadow cabinet team never missed a chance to denigrate the European Union. They constantly presented the Labour prime ministers, Tony Blair until 2007 and Gordon Brown until 2010, as puppets of Brussels who were selling out British interests by supporting the enlargement of the EU to accept ex-communist countries and by allowing workers from those countries to come and work in Britain at jobs the sturdy British worker turned his nose up at.</p>
<p>Cameron refused to directly confront U.K. Independence Party’s (UKIP) xenophobia and anti-European hate language. Most mass-circulation papers, notably those owned offshore by men like Rupert Murdoch, who is not even a British citizen, and other anti-European financiers, denounced the European Union and the presence of Europeans in England. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain produced in 2008 a dossier of 50 hate headlines from one paper, the Daily Mail. Cameron even took the Conservative Party out of the Europe-wide federation of center-right parties such as those led by Germany’s Angela Merkel, Poland’s Donald Tusk, or Spain’s Mariano Rajoy. The federation, known as the European People’s Party, allows all the mainstream conservative parties to connect, debate, and network. It does not require allegiance to any line, but Cameron chose to leave it and set up a new political grouping with hardline nationalist parties, like Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) and more obscure populist-right parties, some with historic negatives on anti-Semitism.</p>
<p>Over decades, Britain has accepted millions of Irish immigrant workers and Asian immigrants from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and East Africa. Moreover, British banks, businesses, and football clubs were stuffed full of European “immigrants.” The father of the 2003–2005 Tory leader, Michael Howard, was a Romanian immigrant, and to his credit, Cameron promoted black and Asian Tory MPs to government positions. But on Europe, the Conservatives whipped up anti-immigrant populism so that when the referendum was called, it was largely a vote on whether or not Brits liked the level of immigrants in their country.</p>
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<p>An English Defence League protest in Newcastle in 2010</p>
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<p>The anti-Semitic, neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) won two seats in the European Parliament, and UKIP under its populist demagogue anti-immigrant leader, Nigel Farage, was also winning votes. Neither the BNP nor UKIP were ever able to win a seat in the House of Commons. Yet the BBC and the press treated Farage as a major mainstream political figure. In the manner of Senator Joe McCarthy, claiming communists were taking over America in the 1950s, or Donald Trump insisting the United States was swamped by Mexican and Muslim immigrants, Farage won a major profile with his claims that the European Union was taking over Britain and a tsunami of European “immigrants”—Polish, Italian, Spanish—were overwhelming English towns and public services. He claimed it was possible to travel through London without hearing English spoken and said, “This country, in a short space of time, has frankly become unrecognizable.” Trump invited Farage to visit him in Trump Tower soon after winning in November 2016 and tweeted: “Many people would like to see @Nigel_Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!” This ultimate fusion of Brexit and Trump has not come to pass, but in their appeal to xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim nationalism, the two men have much in common.</p>
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<p><strong>BREXIT HAS BEEN LIKE A</strong> political Ebola virus eating into the innards of traditional British politics and making parties lose coherence and shape. In conceding the main UKIP demand for a referendum, Cameron calculated that the pro-EU vote would easily win, UKIP would be finished, and anti-European Tory MPs would be marginalized. Rarely has a British prime minister gotten the internal politics of his own country so wrong.</p>
<p>But then May compounded the error. She treated the 48 percent pro-EU vote with contempt, and at her party conference in October 2016 and in subsequent speeches she spoke of the European Union using language that might have been written by Nigel Farage. She disparaged pro-Europeans in Britain, declaring, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” evidently not knowing it was Socrates who said, “I am not a citizen of Athens or of Greece but a citizen of the world.”</p>
<p>In forming her cabinet, she promoted rabid anti-Europeans, including Boris Johnson into the prestigious post as foreign secretary. Johnson had a long record of falsifying news stories and indeed was fired from his first job at The Times for making up quotes. His reporting in the 1990s for The Daily Telegraph about Brussels was often sheer invention. In the Brexit referendum campaign, Johnson made outlandish claims that if voters backed Brexit there would be an extra 350 million pounds a week to spend on Britain’s National Health Service. Johnson also said Turkey was about to join the European Union so that 75 million Turks could come to live and work in Britain. Again, untrue, but for 25 years Johnson had been making Tory audiences laugh and jeer with his inventions about the EU. In his biography of Winston Churchill, Johnson wrote that a “Nazi European Union” was proposed in 1942 with “a single currency, a central bank, a common agricultural policy and other familiar ideas.” This is the man Theresa May made Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State.</p>
<p><span class="pullquote">Opinion polls have turned steadily against Brexit since the referendum, with most showing a desire to stay in the European Union free-trade single market and customs union.</span> The June 2017 election was a major repudiation of May’s handling of Brexit. But Labour has not known what to do with this victory. Corbyn himself is no enthusiast for the European Union, though never a committed Brexiter.</p>
<p>I have examined all his interventions on Europe in the Commons since 2005, and while he urged the European Commission to take more action in support for his favored causes, he never called for withdrawal. He supports the rights of Europeans to live in the United Kingdom and, like any 1970s internationalist, he believes in open borders. He does like the European Union of free markets, rules-enforced competition, and bans on state subsidies to prop up money-losing industries. At times, he can use UKIP-sounding language about European workers driving down wages.</p>
<p>Labour had a golden opportunity to tear into May and pour salt on the open wounds of senior Tory politicians who disagreed on how to handle Brexit. Instead, Labour turned in on itself. Corbyn fired three shadow ministers who voted to support the United Kingdom staying in the single market, even though leaving the single market was UKIP and hardline-Tory Brexit policy. Labour spokespersons contradicted each other. Finally, late in August, Corbyn decided that being bracketed with May as favoring a hard Brexit was not smart, and Labour softened its position. The Party now argues there should be a long transition period after the United Kingdom formally leaves the European Union in spring 2019, and in that transition Britain would stay in the single market and customs union and accept all EU rules. In effect, Britain would stay an EU member, but with no voice over any EU decisions or policies. Labour is now the party of so-called “soft” Brexit, and there is at least a clear divide between Labour and the hardline anti-Europeans in May’s cabinet and the prime minister herself.</p>
<p>Brexit is just as bad for British capitalism. The City is seeing a slow hemorrhage of financial jobs to Frankfurt, Dublin, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, and even Paris as France’s new President Emmanuel Macron insists he wants to make Paris a European and global finance hub. As a former Rothschild banker, he knows of what he speaks. The City’s rise to preeminence on a par with Wall Street is entirely due to Europe. The Single European Act of 1986 provided that if a firm or bank is licensed to do business in one European country, it could do business in all EU member states. Nearly 350,000 so-called banking and financial-service “EU passports” have been issued to traders, dealers, and salespersons in the City.</p>
<p>The British financial industry employs 7.3 percent of the U.K.’s working population, totaling more than 2.2 million people. U.K. financial services constitute the country’s largest tax-paying sector, contributing 11.5 percent of the total. The industry is also the U.K.’s largest exporter, running a trade surplus of around 72 billion pounds. All of this has come about because Margaret Thatcher forced through a massive European-wide banking and financial-services liberalization revolution in the 1980s. Every bank and finance house in the United States, Japan, Switzerland, China, Russia, all of Asia, Latin America, and Africa came and opened up in London to get automatic, unfettered access to the European single market of 500 million middle-class consumers. The British specialty of trading and clearing euros is a $120 trillion–volume business which will now leave London as EU finance ministers and central bank governors have made clear that legal supervision for trading in the world’s second-biggest currency would have to take place under EU supervision.</p>
<p>British businesses, health-care services, tourism, catering, and many niche skilled jobs depend on European citizens—described routinely by the BBC and politicians using the value-loaded word “immigrants”—including half a million Irish citizens, the second-biggest category of EU workers in Britain after Poles. Immigrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka far outnumber all the EU citizens in Britain, but do not face the same xenophobic political and media hate attacks from the right that Europeans encounter. If Britain starts to discriminate against European citizens by imposing immigration controls like travel, work, or residence visas on Europeans, then it will be impossible for Britain to stay in the single market.</p>
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<p>Leaving the EU customs union would have a dramatic impact in Ireland. The Northern Ireland peace agreement has written into it the obligation to accept common EU rules. Today, an Irish nationalist Catholic can live in Derry or anywhere in the six counties of British Ulster and feel as if they are living in one Ireland. They will have an Irish passport, watch the Irish broadcaster RTE, use euros, work or own property in Ireland, drive across the border as if driving from Virginia to Maryland, and no longer feel, like so many Irish felt living under Protestant Loyalist domination between 1920 and 1990, as if they were still colonized by the English.</p>
<p>All the milk in Bailey’s Irish Cream or in the hard cheddar cheese of British supermarkets comes from Ulster cows, but is shipped across the Northern Irish border to the efficient dairy multinationals in Ireland. In the European Union, there is just one Irish economy. Guinness is brewed in St. James, Dublin, and shipped in tankers to Belfast, then bottled or put in barrels and sent back to Dublin for export to anywhere a pint of the “dark stuff” is popular—without having to bother with customs or border formalities.</p>
<p>Outside the EU customs union, the border between the United Kingdom province in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic becomes a crossing point between two sets of tariffs and duties, and will require border posts along the 200 or so roads that cross the 300-mile-long frontier. Once again, uniformed officers of the British state will have their buildings supervising what the Irish are up to. Since the 1920s, the favorite targets for any angry Irish nationalist have been border outposts representing the control of the British state in the northeast corner of Ireland.</p>
<p>If the Tories insist on leaving the EU customs union, then trouble in Northern Ireland is guaranteed, without looking at the endless queues of lorries, vans, and cars to be checked as they go from England to French ports and other harbors on the continental mainland.</p>
<p>Brexit also clearly threatens Britain’s standing as a geopolitical player. For centuries, Britain expended blood and treasure to ensure Europe was open for British commerce, that no dominant continental power, ideology, or faith took over, and that liberal, democratic, rule-of-law values dear to Britain spread across the continent.</p>
<p>In recent decades, Britain has had a seat, a vote, and a voice in all the big-ticket decisions on Europe’s direction of travel. British diplomats, other officials, stellar leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair magnified their influence by cajoling, persuading, nudging the rest of Europe in a desired direction for Britain. This meant building alliances and accepting some pushbacks, but Britain has had more power and influence in Europe in the last few decades than at any previous time in history.</p>
<p>All this comes to a dead shuddering stop upon Brexit, irrespective of whether it is hard or soft. Under May’s proposal, in the spring of 2019, when the next European Parliament is elected, the next European Commission is chosen, and the new Council of Ministers meets, no Brit will be present. The United Kingdom reverts to bilateral diplomacy. Britain overnight becomes an international policy player that has to cool its heels in the waiting rooms of EU deciders from the Council of Ministers to the European Commission.</p>
<p>But Brexit has caught Britain as a small uncertain, confused animal in the headlight glare of nationalist xenophobic populism. The political class has never been so weak or badly led.</p>
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<p><strong>CAN THIS SITUATION REALLY</strong> stand? There is a passionate intensity among the ideologues in the Brexit camp who have invested political belief for two decades or more that the European Union was a monster to be slayed and island Britain should stand alone, as in 1940. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the international business editor of the hardline pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph wrote in an exchange with Stephan Richter, the editor of The Globalist, there would be a “civil war” if any effort were made to reverse Brexit.</p>
<p>This is sheer hyperbole. <span class="pullquote">The evidence suggests that there would be just a huge sigh of relief if politicians could rise to the challenge of avoiding a massive crisis over trade, investment, jobs, and the rights of the British to live, retire, or work across the Channel.</span> There will be die-in-the-ditchers on the right, but the BNP has disappeared as a political force and UKIP got just 1.8 percent of the general election vote.</p>
<p>Business is the dog that is not barking on Brexit. Very few business leaders want to go out front and say with style and punch that Brexit is a disaster. They depend on May and her Brexit ministers for contracts or to become Sir or Lord Someone. Most are Tories who do not want to undermine the Conservative government and risk a hard left-wing Corbyn arriving in 10 Downing Street to create Venezuela on the Thames, as his rightist critics put it.</p>
<p>But Labour does not want to be seen as totally repudiating the decision of the people in the referendum. Labour lost many white working-class pro-Brexit votes in the June general election, and needs to get them back to have any hope of winning power.</p>
<p>There are three basic routes out of the Brexit trap. A prime minister would have to muster the courage to call a second referendum. Or the House of Commons could vote to overturn Brexit. Alternatively, Britain could negotiate an arrangement of affiliated status, much like that enjoyed by Norway or Switzerland. The problem is that neither May nor Corbyn is close to calling a second referendum. It’s not at all clear that even in a free vote, a majority of MPs would vote to reverse Brexit. And other EU leaders have no good reason to give Britain a Norway-style deal.</p>
<p>In Denmark in 1993 and Ireland in 2009, a second referendum was held to reverse an initial rejection of two EU treaties that expanded the powers of the European Union. But the Brexit referendum is rather more fundamental in saying no to the very idea of EU membership. The risk is that voters may feel patronized and decide to confirm their initial vote. What is certain is that in most of the recent national polls in Britain, whatever was assumed would happen did not.</p>
<p>Is it possible for Parliament to take charge and modify or reverse the referendum result, as the Swiss parliament did when it sidelined the 2014 referendum against immigration by EU citizens? This requires higher levels of confident political leadership in Britain than so far have been on display by party leaders.</p>
<p>Conservative MPs have a decidedly anti-European rank and file. They also have a prime minister who decided in August 2016 that she could only be secure if she interpreted and defined a vote to leave the European Union as a full amputational rupture.</p>
<p>Yet Brexit—full British exit from the EU—has not happened. The vote to leave has. But Brits are doubting Thomases. They don’t believe anything has happened or will happen until they can touch, feel it.</p>
<p>In principle, it is possible for Britain to stay in the EU customs union or indeed the single market, but outside the European Union. When the European Economic Community was set up in 1957 by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Britain formed a rival European Free Trade Association (EFTA) to include Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and other countries. But EFTA members insisted on retaining national sovereign control on trade and people flows and rejected a common arbitration court like the European Court of Justice. When Britain and Ireland joined the European Community in 1973, EFTA withered on the vine. It survives as a small club. Its members, other than Switzerland, signed a treaty with the European Union in 1993 and with all EU member states. The combined EU/EFTA nations formed what is called the European Economic Area (EEA). EEA non-EU members like Norway accept EU laws and directives, accept the principle of the four freedoms of movement of capital, goods, services, and people across borders, pay contributions as if an EU member state, and abide by European Court of Justice rulings.</p>
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<p>There is an intense legal debate going on about whether the United Kingdom could continue as an EEA member. Government ministers are talking about a transition period as they desperately try to buy time and avoid a major economic and social crisis in March 2019. At that date, trade, flights, and the right to live and retire in Europe suddenly will be impaired, and many foreign firms will feel obliged to relocate out of the U.K. into the bigger EU market.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>NOT MANY POLITICIANS KNOW</strong> how to admit that a catastrophic mistake has been made. As Friedrich Schiller wrote, “Against stupidity even the Gods contend in vain.”</p>
<p>There is also cold fury in Europe that Britain allowed the hate politics of xenophobic anti-Europeanism to become official policy of David Cameron and his predecessors, with Theresa May as Britain’s Bourbon prime minister who has learned nothing and forgotten nothing about Brexit. So even if the British wake up to their mistake and seek to stay partly in the European Union, there may be no appetite in the EU to allow this to happen on terms the British would want or could accept.</p>
<p>Today I am not sure if Britain can rise to the challenge of avoiding Brexit or at least mitigating its worst impact. Brexit is lose-lose for both Britain and Europe. If it is consummated, the long era of Euro-Atlantic economic integration, promotion of liberal values, and social development between 1945 and Donald Trump’s election will be over. Putin and Trump celebrated Brexit, as did Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland. The aftershock of Brexit has already humiliated Prime Minister Theresa May.</p>
<p>The chief Brexit minister, David Davis, when attacking the Labour government in opposition, declared, “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.” Can British democracy change its mind? Or, like Venice, the Habsburg Empire, and other once-mighty commercial and political powers in Europe, is Brexit the moment when Britain begins to exit world history? </p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Postscript</h3>
<p>Britain’s Brexit drama intensified during the annual fall party political conferences. Theresa May was unable to stamp any authority on her party, as the Conservative conference became a show ground for the ambitions of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who has been aching to be Tory Party leader and prime minister ever since he was at Eton with former Prime Minister David Cameron.</p>
<p>In a 4,000-word article for the pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph, Johnson reaffirmed his faith in a total Brexit. While paying nominal allegiance to the current prime minister, he made clear he was willing and waiting to take over.</p>
<p>May’s keynote speech to her Conservative Party faithful turned into a personal disaster. She kept coughing, and had to break off her speech for a glass of water and a throat lozenge. A prankster was able to get right up to the rostrum where she was speaking and handed her what’s called a P45—the legal notice given at work to those being fired.</p>
<p>Finally, a letter in the slogan on the backdrop began to slide down behind May. Her MPs, activists, and TV viewers at home watched in fascinated horror as she faithfully kept to her autocue text, oblivious to the symbolic disaster behind her back.</p>
<p>There were open challenges to May from former Tory ministers saying she should resign, and the general consensus was that never before in living memory had the party and the nation had such a weak prime minister.</p>
<p>Papers like The Times and Observer openly described Johnson as a “liar,” once an accusation that would have produced writs for defamation to shut up the papers. But May’s foreign secretary cannot go into court and hope to claim that he tells the truth.</p>
<p>But if not Johnson, who? <span class="pullquote">The Conservatives keep looking over their shoulder in fear at Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who has made a connection in terms of authenticity and left-wing conviction that had been utterly forgotten in the years of New Labour Third Way hegemony under Tony Blair and kindred acolytes.</span></p>
<p>As with Bernie Sanders or other left parties and personalities in Europe, it remains to be seen whether the personality cult of Corbyn—with delegates at Labour’s annual congress wearing T-shirts with his photo, chanting “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” like a chorus from Aida—will translate into an election victory.</p>
<p>The rest of Europe—both the 27 EU member states and the leadership teams in the European Commission and European Parliament in Brussels—looked on in bewilderment as London kept temporizing on proposing any real solution to key issues, like the United Kingdom’s financial obligations in the EU-U.K. divorce settlement. Yet May kept insisting that Britain would leave the single market and the customs union.</p>
<p>Brexit evangelists declared that the rest of the world was aching to sign free-trade deals with the United Kingdom, especially with Trump’s America. They seemed to think that NAFTA could be re-opened to incorporate an anti-EU Britain as NAFTA’s fourth member state after the United States, Mexico, and Canada. No one seemed to have the faintest knowledge of the divisions and demonstrations over NAFTA, or how—compared with the EU’s single market, with its extensive social protections, environmental rules, enforceable court rulings on global corporations not paying tax or creating monopolies—NAFTA is an extremely limited trade deal.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Britain reeled as the Trump administration imposed $220 million worth of protectionist tariffs on a mid-sized plane, the Bombardier, which is made in Canada with wings made by 5,000 skilled British workers near Belfast. Neither Boeing nor any other U.S. firm had an equivalent product, and in Ireland there was fury that the United States could threaten such damage to the fragile Northern Irish labor market.</p>
<p>This added to the general woe as the U.K. economy slowed down, with every day bringing reports of banking and other financial-sector firms relocating part of their business to continental capitals. Farming incomes were reported to face cuts of 50 percent once the United Kingdom loses automatic access for its agricultural products to the giant EU market.</p>
<p>Howard Davies, the chair of one of the United Kingdom’s biggest banks, the Royal Bank of Scotland, said that there were only a few months left before the City of London would face an “exodus” of jobs as a result of Brexit. There is massive dissonance gap between what CEOs say in private seminars and in reports produced by consultancies and lawyers, and what they are prepared to say on the record.</p>
<p>The International Monetary Fund reported in October that Britain will trail behind Greece in terms of growth, and nearly all economic forecasts portray the U.K. becoming the weakest of the major EU and G7 economies.</p>
<p>New car sales dropped by 9.3 percent in September. In the five years before Brexit, household spending growth averaged 0.6 percent a quarter. In the four quarters since Brexit, household spending has risen by just 0.2 percent. Inflation at 2.9 percent outstrips pay increases of 2.1 percent. Most economic commentators expect an interest rate rise, especially if the Fed moves rates upward. All this bad economic news led Moody’s to downgrade Britain’s rating.</p>
<p>If any of this negative economic news had happened under a Labour government, the press and Tory MPs would be making this British economic decline a constant headline narrative. And all this has happened well before Brexit bites, as trade access and inward investment declines thanks to the sheer uncertainty of what the economic future of Britain will be if fully amputated from Europe.</p>
<p>But Brexit is a Tory problem, and so the silence of anti-Brexit Conservative MPs is deafening. There are 316 Tory MPs. In the cabinet, eight are as identified anti-European ideologues—like Johnson, Environment Secretary Michael Gove, or Transport Secretary Chris Grayling, who in previous positions had ordered a ban on books being sent to prisoners in prison and was ready to support small hotel and Airbnb owners who refused to let rooms to gay couples.</p>
<p>There are an estimated 40 to 60 Tory MPs who form a clear pro-Brexit pressure group. But even if one adds together all the identified pro-Brexit MPs, that still leaves well over 200 Tory MPs who have not declared their hand. Most Tory MPs voted against Brexit in the June 2016 plebiscite.</p>
<p>At what stage do they emerge and begin to discuss publicly the risks of the amputational Brexit urged upon May by hardline anti-Europeans in her party?</p>
<p>The reduced vote for Angela Merkel and the insistence by populist Catalan Nationalist secessionists on breaking up Spain are now major headaches for Europe. The European Union has no choice but to insist on the unity of its member states and not endorse or encourage secession and separatism. The clumsy handling of the Catalan question by Madrid has played into the hands of those who like to portray the EU as crushing national identity—in this case, Catalan separatism.</p>
<p>But as with the problem of Polish and Hungarian nationalist illiberalism, the European Union can ride the Catalan question for the time being, as both Castilians and Catalans on the Iberian Peninsula work out their differences.</p>
<p>Brexit is of a different order. There are calls for a second referendum or even a simple withdrawal of the United Kingdom’s policy of leaving Europe. But public opinion is not there yet, and Tory MPs are not ready to rise to the challenge of speaking for the 63 percent of British voters who either rejected Brexit or stayed at home and did not vote. Will this continue, or will British capitalism and its agents in the Conservative Party in Parliament find a way to avoid latter-day economic and geopolitical isolationism? Many hoped that after the September-October party conference season, there would be some clarity. This hasn’t happened. Britain is drifting rudderless toward a major recasting of its place in world affairs. <em>—October 13, 2017 </em></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 16 Oct 2017 09:08:41 +0000228718 at http://prospect.orgDenis MacShaneThe Powerlessness of Power: Politics in Britain Todayhttp://prospect.org/article/powerlessness-power-politics-britain-today
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<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>welve months after the Brexit plebiscite, and two weeks after the general election, British politics has no direction, no sense of purpose, and no commanding personalities. The classic institutions of the state—the civil service, big business, the media, the professions, the intellectuals, the trade unions, the churches, the very people themselves—feel powerless and unable to control what is happening and where Britain should go.</p>
<p>Normally in a democracy, a national election such as produced a President Trump or a President Macron would answer the question. But Britain has had four major elections in under four years—two referendums on Scotland and on Europe, and two general elections—and no one in the nation knows what the people want.</p>
<p>It does mean, however, that there will be no early rush to a new election. I have met with Tory peers and members of parliament, and they are quite clear that they will not support any early election.</p>
<p>The Conservatives have a strong majority over Labour, with 318 MPs compared with Labour’s 261. Although Labour gained some seats, it also lost some. In Labour’s 1992 election loss, for example, leader Neil Kinnock won more seats than Jeremy Corbyn did for Labour in 2017.</p>
<p>The Scottish Nationalists (SNP) are the third-biggest party and will not want the adventure of an early election, having lost badly on June 8, including the ousting of Alex Salmond, their own historic party leader, as well as Angus Robertson, leader of the SNP MPs in the House of Commons.</p>
<p>Northern Irish Protestant MPs, nearly all in the anti-Republic, anti-Catholic Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), will not want to risk another election in which their arch-enemy, Sinn Fein, may continue to do well.</p>
<p>So the parliamentary arithmetic is not there for an early election, despite the claims from Labour that they can defeat Theresa May in the Commons. She can probably rely in the ten DUP MPs, which gives her a nominal total of 328 seats—a small but perfectly workable majority in the House of Commons.</p>
<p>The immediate future is for no new laws—just transposition of E.U. legislation. May has dropped from her program all controversial measures, especially those contained in the party manifesto that angered Tory MPs and cost some seats and the party its majority.</p>
<p>But there is nothing to vote against if you are a Tory or DUP MP. And no Tory is going to make common cause with Labour’s Corbyn, a man they despise as a Hugo Chavez leftist. Nor will Tories ally with the SNP, since the Conservatives did well in Scotland in the election, and believe they can turn back the tide of nationalism and the threat to the unity of the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>So the main legislative program of 2017 to 2019 will focus on converting into U.K. laws aspects of current E.U. legal provisions—a necessary precondition for Brexit. Because these are constitutional provisions, they have to be dealt with by the House of Commons as a whole, and not sent away to committees.</p>
<p>Suffice it to say this allows any MP to propose amendments, filibuster, or demand votes, with all this being repeated in the House of Lords where there is a strong majority that favors remaining in the European Union.</p>
<p>On some issues, I would expect anti-Brexit MPs in all parties to make common cause and stop a measure or amend it in a pro-European way. It will then be up to May and her cabinet to accept that vote or try and defeat it. However, she has the ability to control floor business, to withdraw proposals, and in the end to accept defeat and avoid moving to a vote of confidence, which in any event she would be likely to win.</p>
<p>But all this will make for an unstable, confused two years of parliamentary business. There will be little opportunity for business or other outside bodies to lobby effectively or to try to shape legislation.</p>
<p>If there is little chance of an early election, there is also little chance of May staying on as prime minister to lead the Tories at the next election. I am astonished at the level of personal venom and contempt I hear in private discussions with Tories about her.</p>
<p>Normally, the Conservative Party controls itself and does not show its personal feelings about its leader. This is no longer the case. They despise her.</p>
<p>But they have no alternative. To hold a leadership contest now would be to expose the deep divisions within the party. It is too simplistic to describe the divide as pro-E.U. or pro-Brexit. Since the days of Reagan and Thatcher, the Tories have been an American party. No longer with Trump.</p>
<p>The long reign of Thatcher neoliberalism is over. Britain under all its last six prime ministers (four Conservative, two Labour) has been pro-business, pro-rich, pro-accumulation, with much of the population left behind.</p>
<p>Average workers have not had a pay raise for ten years. No new social housing has been built for 30 years. The poor are put into giant tower blocks that turn into blazing infernos.</p>
<p>Three million Eastern and Mediterranean Europeans have arrived in just a few years, and the number of Muslim immigrants keep rising. This puts big pressure on public services, social cohesion, and a common British sense of belonging, citizenship, and identity.</p>
<p>There are 20,000 fewer police on the streets than in 2010. Hospitals are under pressure. It is harder to get to see a doctor (I speak from recent personal experience!). The armed services have been cut. Islamist recruitment and propaganda continues.</p>
<p>The Brexit and election votes were—in part—an uprising of the forgotten and those who have not benefited from globalization and modern economic practices.</p>
<p>The Tory MPs are very conscious of this, but so far there is no Tory MP who seems able to articulate a new vision of what needs to be done. The Tories have no Merkel, no Rajoy, no Reagan. So until someone emerges, they may stick with May. Ordinary MPs like weak government and a prime minister who has to listen to them. They have the power and the government is powerless.</p>
<p>This will make for a weak and unstable government unable to make decisions to control the deficit or have proper investment and legislative priorities.</p>
<p>Labour under Corbyn will be more confident. His Bernie Sanders leftism is a way of being cheered, but it is not a program for government or for winning a majority.</p>
<p>Labour, as in the 1950s and 1980s, has some way to go to becoming a credible alternative government. There is now a major revolt of 50 Labour MPs, MEPs, and peers who have signed a statement in favor of the single market and customs union, and the internal management of immigration, rather than with work- or residence-permit bureaucracy or regional and seasonal quotas.</p>
<p>A major Labour donor, Lord Sainsbury (of the supermarket family) has just cut his funding for a Blairite organization called Progress which articulated Macron-type centrist Labour ideas.</p>
<p>The Labour party has lost its third election in seven years, and while Corbyn has saved his personal honor and undoubtedly been seen as the winner of the election by comparison with May, he is not widely seen as a future prime minister. Labour will see new divisions, personality clashes, and efforts by Trotskyist and other demagogues to gain more control over the party. So this means Labour also faces a period of uncertainty, like the Conservatives.</p>
<p>The first day of Brexit negotiations on June 19 signaled that until there is an answer to the Brexit question there cannot be an answer to the question of British politics. E.U. leaders dismissed out of hand May’s clumsy and poorly thought-out proposals on E.U. citizens in the U.K., and there will be far more contentious issues to come.</p>
<p>The outlook for British politics is one of confusion, lack of leadership, and barely hidden divisions and hatreds. The next two years will be probably the unhappiest and least coherent 24 months in British politics since the end of World War II.</p>
</div></div></div>Tue, 27 Jun 2017 09:02:37 +0000227985 at http://prospect.orgDenis MacShaneDo Europeans Do It Better?http://prospect.org/article/do-europeans-do-it-better
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+3">L</font>abor policy in the United States has been marked by two self defeating attitudes. First, while public policy prescribes a ritualized system of collective bargaining, in most substantive areas policy is silent or reactive, allowing employers broad discretion over work organization, worker training, and incomes policy. At the same time, labor and business leaders are consumed by an us-versus-them mentality in which there can be only one winner. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Labor policies in other countries suggest how a labor movement can be stronger yet at the same time more friendly to a high-wage, highe-productivity path. That path, in turn, can offer new ways to revive the labor movement. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">American corporate culture is now strongly influenced from overseas, from Japanese "just-in-time" production systems to the marketing standards set by the Italian retailer Benetton. An Irishman runs that quintessential American company, Heinz, while an Australian (Rupert Murdoch) runs America's most successful media empire. The success of Asian companies with operations in America has brought durable change to American management techniques. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The one exception is in human resource management, where the United States has developed a culture of its own--that seems to satisfy no one. Managers complain about the poor education of workers, and unions protest their weakness vis-à-vis employers. Both look to government for solutions. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">THREE FALLACIES</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">U.S. labor policy could learn much from abroad, but there are three fallacies that first need to be dispelled. Fallacy number one is that they do things wholly better somewhere else--Germany, Sweden, or Japan is usually mentioned, depending on the ideology of the writer. But there is no made-to-measure policy package that can be taken off the shelf from another nation and imposed on the United States. Pieces of different policies can be borrowed and applied to the United States, but the endless litanies of how great it is somewhere else are counterproductive. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Fallacy number two, however, insists to the contrary that the American context is unique; that policy just needs a little tinkering or a return to some long-past golden era. In truth, President Clinton was elected because Americans shared his view that key aspects of American society, including health insurance and education, both pillars of labor market policy, are in deep crisis and need massive reform. Again, lessons can be learned from other countries, and a reinvigorated Labor Department should examine what successful foreign mechanisms could be adapted to American conditions. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Fallacy number three is that somewhere at the end of the rainbow is a world of splendid industrial partnerships in which differences are dissolved in mutual trust and recognition between managers and employees, between labor and capital, between business, government, and unions. There is no need to revert to class war language of the 1930s campus to appreciate that this is nonsense. There are enduring differences between the boss and the bossed and between those that have money to invest and those that have only their labor to sell, their brains for hire. Yet positive-sum collaboration is still possible given the right institutions. </font></p>
<hr size="1" /><center><font class="nonprinting"><a href="/subscribe/"><img alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" border="0" src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" /></a> </font></center><br /><hr size="1" /><h3><font class="nonprinting">ADVERSARIAL COLLABORATION</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">For many years, Germany was held up as an exemplar of industrial partnership politics. But as Franz Steinkuhler, the former president of the 3.6 million strong German manufacturing union, IG Metall, stated, "We are neither the junior partners of government, nor the social partners of capital." Modern German theoreticians of German industrial relations prefer to talk of <i>Konfliktpartnerschaft</i>, an oxymoronic word that can be translated as "adversarial collaboration." As the term suggests, the partnership built into the German system is based on accepting that the two sides have different interests. On occasion, the resolution of these differences may require a conflict when neither side will move from positions they consider to be ones of principle. The recent strikes in East Germany over wage equalization are an example of how industrial conflict is sometimes unavoidable. But the principle of partnership was sustained in other areas. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, compensation costs per employee rose only 4.4 percent in Germany from 1978 to 1988, compared with 5.9 percent in the United States, reflecting German wage moderation notwithstanding strong unions. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">So while it is necessary to talk the language of partnership, it is vital to see that partnership must acknowledge conflict for it not to be one-sided. In American terms, one might call it "adversarial participation" in order to underline the need for partnership between workers and their employers and the acceptance that differences will emerge and need resolution. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The linkage is important. When labor markets are all participation and suppress adversarial or conflictual needs, they become like Japan. Japanese manufacturing success has been the envy of the world, but few Americans would accept the Japanese social system or the built-in denial of equal rights to women or minorities (in Japan, the Korean minority), or the complete subordination of workers to managers. American unionists, on the other hand, may prefer to believe in the virtues of unconstrained adversarial laborism, but when there is no participation--or an explicit rejection of partnership--and when work relations are dominated by conflict, the result is disastrous for the unions. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In Britain, the conflict-centered labor market politics of the 1970s, when shop stewards controlled unions, provided no new directions but instead led to the revenge of Thatcherism. Anti-union employers applauded Thatcher's restrictions on union rights, but at the end of her 11 years, Britain's economic indices showed the country to be worse off than when she took office and launched her crusade against worker rights. In France, where the main union, the CGT, is controlled by pre-Gorbachev communists and proclaims a commitment to class mobilization and a contempt for negotiation, union membership is well below 10 percent of the work force. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">However, labor policies in many countries do work, and Americans should try to learn which ideas would best fit in the United States. There is or should be information about the policies that work overseas from the network of labor counselors in most leading embassies. It has never been quite clear to non-American trade unionists if these friendly, knowledgeable and helpful officials are merely State Department agents tracking the activity of overseas labor movements or whether they have any input into labor market policy back in America. With the Cold War over, their task of keeping an eye on undemocratic politics in overseas trade unions is redundant. Now that the CIA is being urged to undertake industrial espionage on behalf of American companies, perhaps labor attachés can inform the government about the secrets of labor market policies as they function overseas. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">INNOCENCE ABROAD</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But there is an even better source of information and ideas about what works overseas: American business itself. General Motors or Ford, for example, could tell what it is like to work with trade union nominees and elected worker representatives on the board of directors. Top American GM and Ford executives have made their names recently in Europe, where they have to sit alongside IG Metall unionists on the boards of GM and Ford subsidiaries in Germany. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Executives of Apple Computer in France could explain how the conservative political parties are committed to increasing apprentice training in France. The manifesto of the majority party in the new French government called for employee share ownership schemes to put employee representatives on the boards of main companies. When the new right-wing prime minister, Eduard Balladur, took over in March 1993, the first thing he did was to call in the trade unions to discuss the country's economic problems. Certainly, he imposed his own policies, but the consultation process was important. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">IBM could explain how its operations in Sweden work with full union recognition in all plants and for all categories of workers up to top technical staff and middle managers. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Motorola and Hewlett-Packard in Singapore and Malaysia could report on how narrower wage differentials between executives and employees help to sustain a mutual commitment to company success. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In Britain, any one of the 50,000 American executives there could be called back home to explain how a state-funded health system lifts a load of costs off the backs of companies. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">DuPont, the U.S. chemical multinational, is the largest private employer in Geneva. Americans working there could explain how the Swiss apprentice scheme and properly financed public schools combine to produce a well-educated work force. American leaders under a Democratic administration do not have to invent new theories but simply should invite leading companies to suggest the best practices elsewhere and implement them in America. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">WORKING TIME: REDUCE IT</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Consider one example, working time, the first area of legislative change needed in the American labor market. The United States, still by far the richest country in the world, is increasing its working hours instead of creating a more positive balance between work and leisure time. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Every study shows that industrial workers are diminishing. If that's the case, why are American industrial workers putting in more hours, regular and overtime, today than in 1980? Over the same period, the German work week has come down to 35 hours, mainly in the form of Friday afternoons taken off, with a regular six weeks of holiday. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">On the contrary, cutting down on work hours forces managers and workers to improve productivity and lower unit costs. Britain has Europe's highest overtime hours worked and Europe's highest unit labor costs, which may explain why there are no longer many British products on sale in the United States. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In 1938, America introduced the 40-hour week when anything up to 56 hours was common in Europe and the weekend was something only the rich enjoyed. By world standards, it was a revolutionary move and, according to classical economists, should have been a disaster for the Unites States. On the contrary, it focused pressure on quality, not quantity, and gave America a great boost. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The French made the 39-hour week and five weeks paid holiday compulsory in 1981, and, despite dark mutterings, the French economy has grown faster than that of the United States since 1986. Longer vacations gave a great boost to the tourism and leisure industry, a vital new employment growth area. The United States is the most extraordinary country to visit, but it has the world's most underexploited tourist and vacation possibilities. As a European who loves visiting the United States, I often feel that with my annual six weeks' paid holiday I have seen more of this stunning country than my American friends with their miserable fortnight. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><i>Fortune</i> recently reported on American executives doing 90-hour weeks, up at 6 a.m. and working until 10.30 p.m. This is insane. Many will work long hours to start up a business, or deal with a special project, or write books, or become labor secretaries or president, but that should be voluntary and the exception, not the expected rule. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">As long as the 40 to 50 hour week and two-week holiday norms exist, the U.S. will head toward Third World levels of working time, and the Third World will respond by working even longer to maintain its comparative advantage. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">This is where legislative change is needed urgently. The Clinton administration should give Americans a break and create thousands of leisure and tourist industry jobs by legislating for the same annual vacation entitlement--a minimum five weeks--that most Europeans enjoy. Mandating work rules provokes an outcry in the United States, but unless everyone faces the same pressure to improve work practice, then the best practice of some firms will always be undercut by their rivals. Shorter working time also opens up new jobs, and reduces unemployment generally. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">WORKER TRAINING: JUST DO IT</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">President Clinton and Labor Secretary Robert Reich should follow through on their commitment to improve worker training. The Northern European apprenticeship schemes are not easily transferable to the United States because they involve rigorous control of employers, schools and teenagers, imposing obligations on all three that would not fit with American traditions of individualism. Instead, President Clinton's campaign proposal for a 1.5 percent payroll levy to be spent on training should be imposed as soon as possible. The responsibility for overseeing how the money is spent should not be a government task, nor left to management who will spend the money on MBA or flashy executive-training programs in the Virgin Islands. Instead, it should be entrusted to a new statutory body representative of the U.S. workplace. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">It could be called a company training council, obligatory for any firm with more than 50 employees. It would be elected by the employees. Managers would have to consult with it over the scale and nature of any training program, but the final decision would rest with the work force's elected representatives themselves. An external agency, such as a national training board, could act as a court of final appeal to ensure that money was used within legal parameters. Clearly in many firms, such company training councils would correspond to existing trade union structures. Steve Yokich, the UAW's vice president, has pioneered training schemes at Ford and GM that are innovative and based on a payroll levy of 15 cents an hour. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Legislating this kind of structure, which combines both the 1.5 percent payroll training tax of France with obligatory elected employee involvement characteristic of Northern European countries, would create a new $60 billion dollar industry of employee training ($60 billion equals 1.5 percent of the current $4.3 trillion paid in salaries in America). In Japan, Germany, and the Nordic countries, the provision of training provides thousands of jobs. Hundreds of language schools have been created in France as learning English is one common executive training expenditure of French companies. Obligatory training and employee participation would challenge American employers and employees to work together to improve the quality of human skills as well as enhanced output of goods and services. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">U.S. labor law generally needs to be brought into line with that of other countries. The hiring of strikebreakers during a legal dispute is not permitted elsewhere in the democratic world, and in most countries firms have to give adequate notice before laying off employees. The barriers put in the way of unions trying to obtain recognition are also bizarre and undemocratic by international standards. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Maternity or family leave rights in the United States are a disgrace as well. Even if President Clinton has lifted the Republican veto on the (unpaid) family leave law, it falls well behind minimum European levels which provide for paid leave. Even poor Greece provides 15 weeks paid maternity leave, and a mother is guaranteed her job for a year after giving birth. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">IT'S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE STUTTGART</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">If the best practice from overseas should be taken up by American firms, then the same is true of American unions. The object is not to graft any particular system onto the U.S. labor movement but to encourage examination of what works in other countries. Could one of the world's best rooted and proudest labor movements decide there was more to learn abroad than to teach? If it did, here is a quick tour of what they might learn from other countries. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Let's go to Japan first. In traditional terms, Japanese "company unionism" has meant a boss-run business whose main purpose was to keep down wages and guarantee super-profits for the rich. Yet Japanese workers until recently were getting real wage increases, and the momentum of Japanese growth has been full employment and steadily increasing internal demand. In March, the Japanese unions agreed to a wage increase that, while barely keeping pace with inflation, still added an extra $8 billion to the total Japanese wage bill and the purchasing power of ordinary people. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">There is one aspect of Japanese company unionism that may be worth transplanting to America: the obsession with single status. There are no blue- and white-collar pay and conditions in Japan. The unions are pliant on line speed, job transfers, and other issues that would provoke resistance in the United States, but they are quick to prevent any development that lets one worker believe he or she has more dignity or worth than the next. If Hiroshi the gardener has to wear a company jacket and punch in, then so does Ichiro the manager. Holidays, medical care, seniority rules are the same for all. Bosses remain bosses and workers work, but the perks and status that so obsess American managers are absent. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Another issue to be borrowed from Japan and other dynamic Asian economies like Taiwan or Singapore is the much lower ratio between bottom and top pay in companies. A top U.S. executive will earn 50 or even 100 times what a worker earns; in Japan the executive will earn 10 times what the employee gets. As well as an improved minimum wage, American unions should campaign for a what amounts to a maximum wage, by requiring firms to pay taxes on exorbitant executive compensation. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Our commission can then fly to Canada to ask why the Canadian labor movement organizes about twice the number of workers as exist in unions in the United States. If they visit Sweden, they will feel that here at least is a union nirvana with organization rates of up to 95 percent. Even with the pressure of a conservative government and mounting unemployment, the Swedish unions remain far more powerful in society and among workers than do American or British ones. But transplanting the conditions for Swedish unionism to the United States is impossible. Along with Sweden's well known active labor market policy, with its extensive public employment and retraining features, co-determination, and "solidaristic" wage policy of narrowing wage differentials, one other technique may be worth borrowing. That is to copy a practice of SIF, the Swedish union for non-manual industrial workers. It has officials working full-time at universities and technical colleges to recruit employees before they join their firms. In Sweden the task is easier because there is only one union. In the United States, half a dozen unions all compete with each other to represent the same category of employees. Moreover, it is unclear from U.S. law whether supervisory staff and junior managers may join a union. But a trade union presence on campuses, particularly as university education has become accessible to more of the population, is long overdue. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Copying Denmark or Belgium, American trade unions might bid to run part of the social insurance system. That would create an additional benefit that comes with belonging to a union. This would be a return to the old roots of the unions as mutual benefit societies. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Our commission might notice the low unionization rate among American women--and the signal sent by the lack of U.S. women union presidents. By contrast, Switzerland was the last country in Europe to give women the vote, but it is the first country to put women in charge of major unions. Christianne Brunner was elected last year as president of the Swiss metal and construction industry union, the sister union to the Machinists or IUE. Her friend, Ruth Dreifuss, was a national secretary of the Swiss equivalent of the AFL-CIO and has just been elected to the country's seven-person federal cabinet. In France, the general secretary of the CFDT, France's second biggest labor confederation, is Nicole Niotat. In the German trade union federation, DGB, sister to the AFL-CIO, the number two is also a woman. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">WORK COUNCILS IN EUROPE</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The power of trade unions in Germany can be overstated. Britain, for example, still has a higher percentage of the work force in unions than Germany does. But one concept from Germany is worth examining: the independent works council. It is vital to distinguish the German works council, which consists of workers only and has no management representatives on it, from the company councils that exist under French law which are chaired by the managing director and have managers sitting with employee representatives. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The works council in the German system is a legal body whose members have to be consulted on a wide range of management prerogatives. They are also the channel for elections to the board of directors of bigger companies. Except for Britain and Ireland, unions in Europe all have some kind of works council. This does not reduce the militancy or effectiveness of unions. (In Germany, 90 percent of the members of the works councils are elected from union lists.) Instead, it creates a dual power system. Works councils force some collective, electoral representation into a workplace that otherwise can resist the external presence of a union because those workers who are nominated or who seek election as works councilors must turn to unions for help. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The Social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty calls for the creation of pan-European works councils in large firms. Despite British objections, the other eleven members of the European Community are determined to press ahead with creating European Works Councils for the more than 1,000 multinational companies that operate in two or more European countries. Formal agreements already have been signed with Volkswagen and with Thomson, the French electronics multinational. Workers in American companies have set up European works councils. American unions and workers should also be playing their part in this process of extending the European works councils to include U.S. participation. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In Italy, lessons could be learned about popular mobilization. In the past, American trade unions looked scornfully upon the Latin propensity to organize general strikes and street demonstrations. Britain's Trades Union Congress tried its first and only general strike in 1926 and was still analyzing the consequences 60 years later. It has yet to organize a second one. The AFL-CIO has yet to try. But when the AFL-CIO does try a popular street protest, as in the great Washington solidarity demonstrations in the first years of the Reagan era, it is delighted with the result. A little dropping of the stiff Puritan upper lip and a touch more flamboyance in public would do no harm. If it is no longer able to deliver as much bread to its members as it would like, the American labor movement can pass the time with the odd circus. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">After all this, our commission might head to Australia, where the government did exactly what American unions and government should do. When the labor government was elected in 1982, Prime Minister Bob Hawke suggested that unions take a look abroad. A blue-ribbon commission of labor leaders, researchers and academics was dispatched to other lands. They came back with a set of recommendations that significantly changed the face of the labor movement, including a reduction in job classification, speedier union mergers, and a national accord covering salaries, investment, and training. The changes allowed Australian labor to regain its influence in a positive manner. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+3">I</font>t is in the realms of politics and ideas that the clear lessons are to be learned. Most of the vibrant European unions encourage serious ideological and analytical discussion and debate. Germany's DGB publishes a monthly theoretical journal that often carries pieces sharply critical of the DGB and its affiliates. Swedish unions spend up to 25 percent of their dues on communications and education. Spain's Labor Ministry publishes serious studies independent of the government line. The Italian unions publish reports that outshine those of think tanks. Europe's unions are also mainstays of Europe's labor and social democratic parties. American unions play something of the same role in the Democratic party, but as the U.S. labor movement has grown relatively weaker, the Democrats have begun to take them for granted--except when they need financial contributions, get-out-the-vote drives, and volunteer phone banks. By becoming more ideologically, institutionally, and politically serious, America's unionists can reclaim what is rightfully theirs. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">American unions have a history of organization, struggle, survival, and growth dating back more than a century. The time has come to learn from the unions that U.S. labor supported in the past or even helped give birth to. It is time for American unions to find what organization, policy and ideas may now be borrowed back, to re-kindle the fire which American labor's many enemies in this country would like to see extinguished forever. </font></p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:14:25 +0000141443 at http://prospect.orgDenis MacShane